'Did you know that William Wallace prayed for inspiration in
Renfrew, and that he got it?'

The Guardian Weekend February 8 1997

Awake! awake O sleeper of the land of shadows, wake! expand!

I am in you and you in me, mutual in love divine:

Fibres of love from man to man thro' Albion's pleasant land."

— William Blake: Jerusalem.

"Hey
Scoob: did you just break into my house?"

"Whaaaat?"

"Little Jimmy told us. He says
he saw you..."

"Hey listen. I don’t do that.
You know me. I don’t break into people's houses."

"Jimmy says he saw you with
Linda carrying all our stuff away. She's taken the wains toys. Left the video,
but took the toys."

"Oh no! I helped her to carry
it. I was just doin' my gentlemanly bit, you know. She was strugglin' with all
this stuff, an' I just helped her to carry it, that's all."

There's a bunch of us out on the
street by now, standing in the relentless West of Scotland rain, little Laura
(Scoob's niece) paddling in the puddles, me watching her, two young women,
Scoob, a couple of men just wandering by, Scoob's Mom leaning out of her flat
window calling to Laura to get out of the puddles.

"Can you believe it," says
Scoob to the men. "I was just helpin' a lassie with her stuff, an' now it
turns out that she's broken into someone's house to steal it. There was a bit
missin' from one of the toys. She even told me: 'if you see a little yellow bit,
pick it up for us.' I can’t believe this."

"The usual fuckin'
madness," one of them says: "Toon-town craziness."

The thing is I'd watched the whole
scene unfold earlier on from the window of Scoob's Mom's flat. I was just
looking out at the rain and I'd seen this girl struggling with all these black
plastic bags; and then later Scoob had come back in looking for fags saying
he'd just met his friend Linda, she was a nice girl but a bit messed up, and he
was helping her. And after that there was this gaggle of people around the
telephone booth. I was just watching it all, you know, bog-eyed with a whiskey
hangover, not putting any of the pieces together, seeing the relentless rain
washing down over that grey scene out there, drinking in that sweet, damp Scottish
air like it was water, and even then I was thinking, "this sums it up.
This is Renfrew for you."

Well Scoob is panicking by now. He's
caught in the working class equivalent of a philosophical dilemma. On the one
hand he's likely to get beaten up for stealing all that stuff. On the other
he's just as likely to get beaten up for grassing on poor Linda. He's talking
frantically, waving his arms about, explaining the situation. And that's when I
first see it. Something's going on here. It's like he's sending out little
filaments to bind these people together, web-like fibres of some psychic
material woven out of his own good-intentions. Of course he didn't steal those
toys. Everyone knows that. The knot of people unravels suddenly and Scoob and
Laura and I walk away.

"And this is the sort of
community street life the high-rise block is killin' off," says Scoob,
quoting from The Young Ones.

Renfrew. It's this hotchpotch of
tenement schemes, all grey, like a Lego-land toy-town put together by some grim
child without any imagination. Glaswegians refer to it as "the Wild
West" because of the drug wars that have claimed so many lives in the last
year or two. Scoob himself has seen twenty two of his friends die, mainly to do
with drugs. But he also tells me it's the cradle of the Royal Stewarts, the
historical capital of Scotland. There's a mystery here, a
secret lodged between these dark, rain-smeared tenements. Did the Knights
Templar land here after their ejection from France in 1307? Were they the
secret source of the early Scottish Kings' great wealth and power? Is Renfrew
the site of the Templar's New Jerusalem?

Interestingly, the Knights Templar
were followers of John the Baptist; and it's Renfrew's own John the Baptist
that we're on our way to see now, having dropped Laura off at the Nursery. John
Plott: "A plot's a plan or a small piece of land, but I have the Big
Picture." That's how he talks, in Capital Letters. John the Bastard, the
maddest and yet the sanest man I know, a real warrior-type, as brave as the
hills. He's mad because he has the sheer audacity to call himself a prophet.
He's sane because he's almost single-handedly changing the face of Renfrew.

"Look at that," Scoob
says, pointing to a huge chunk of plaster that's fallen from the wall near the
door frame. I know what he means. We're in this grey concrete stairwell in a
council scheme tenement block, in one of the poorest parts of Britain, and behind that door
Something is happening. It's hard to specify what, exactly. Superficially, it's
the seat of Renfrew United, the organisation set up by John to tackle the drug
problem. But there's something else too: something more difficult to define at
first. John invites us into what he calls "the office". It's his
bedroom. There's a weight frame in the middle of the room, and a punch-bag
dangling. Scoob soon has his shirt off, and he's laying into the punch bag with
all these marshal art dodging manoeuvres. There's posters with quotes from
Martin Luther King and Malcolm X on the wall, and a crucifix. A picture of John with Mohammed Ali, his hero. A prayer or
two. John launches into his spiel. "I had this dream, that I was being
attacked. So I asked someone to look it up in her dream book. She says it means
a message will come to me. An' that night there was a knock at the door, and
this feller says, 'did you know that William Wallace prayed for inspiration in
Renfrew, and that he got it?' He says, 'it could have been right here,'
pointing at the floor in our living room. So that was the message. I'm like
that... Whoaaa..." And he raises his hands like some old-time preacher,
and falls back against the wall, his eyes sizzling with intensity, as if he's
just had a jolt of electricity from the heart of the Universal grid. "Tune
into Radio God," he says. "Thoughts are things."

So what is it that's happening in
this small insignificant town in the West of Scotland? John would call it
spiritual: the Scottish Renaissance. Scoob talks of community. But me, I think
it's an intellectual thing. It's the stuff of the mind. People are talking,
talking, talking, trying to make sense of their poverty and their own sense of
worthlessness, trying to take on the drug-barons and the money-merchants and
all the powers of corruption that are holding them down. John is at the centre
of this because he's the wisest and bravest of them all. He's the only man,
maybe in the history of the world, to get 20 junkies to leap from an aeroplane
together. What John has is a vision, of how it might be. Amidst these gross,
grey concrete lumps there's a sense of pride and self-worth just beginning to
grow, a sense of belonging. It's like filaments of love binding the whole town
together. People care.

Later Scoob says, "if we want
somethin' we're just gonna take it. And what can they do? We are the
community."

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